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Eero Vaara

Professor in Organisations and Impact

  • eero.vaara@sbs.ox.ac.uk

Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street
Oxford
OX1 1HP

Profile

Eero’s research focuses on strategic and institutional change. He is a world leading expert in discursive and narrative perspectives.

Eero’s work deals with strategy process and practice research, studies of radical change such as mergers and acquisitions, work on institutional change and legitimation, and research on multinational corporations, nationalism and globalisation.

Eero combines practically relevant topics such as strategy work and management of postmerger integration with deep theoretical and methodological reflection on organisational and strategic processes and practices.

Research

Eero has published widely and served in editorial roles in leading scholarly journals.

Eero pursues research in four key areas: 

  1. strategy process and practice research
  2. radical organisational and strategic change
  3. institutional change and legitimation
  4. MNCs, nationalism and globalisation.

What cuts across these research interests is an attempt to better understand how communication, discourses and narratives are used in and around organisations and how they construct organisational reality. He has developed especially the ways in which critical discursive perspectives can be used in organisation and strategy research and advanced research on organisational narratives. Lately, he has also worked on historical analysis.

This research has been published in leading journals, and he has served e.g. as an Associate Editor in AMJ. He has received several awards for his publications such as Roland Calori Prize for the Best Paper published in Organisation Studies in (awarded July 2003), OMT Best Published Paper Award 2014 (with Joep Cornelissen and Saku Mantere) and JIBS Silver Medal for Significant Contributions to International Business in 2019.

Eero has also served in leadership roles in international societies and associations (e.g. Chair of EGOS, member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management, and board member in EIASM).

He is an Academy of Management Fellow and a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. 

Publications

Discursive legitimation: an integrative theoretical framework and agenda for future research

  • Journal article
  • Journal of Management
  • Eero Vaara,
  • Ana M Aranda,
  • Helen Etchanchu
Organisation Studies
Strategy
Innovation

How to successfully scale a flat organization

  • Journal article
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Eero Vaara,
  • Anni Harju,
  • Mia Leppälä,
  • Mickael Buffart
Organisation Studies
Strategy
Innovation

Increasing dispositional legitimacy: progressive legitimation dynamics in a trajectory of settlements

  • Journal article
  • Academy of Management Journal
  • Sofiana Baba,
  • Innan Sasaki,
  • Eero Vaara
Organisation Studies
Strategy
Innovation

Maintaining strategic ambiguity for protection: struggles over opacity, equivocality and absurdity around the Sicilian Mafia

  • Journal article
  • Academy of Management Journal
  • Giulia Cappellaro,
  • Amelia Compagni,
  • Eero Vaara
Organisation Studies
Strategy
Innovation

Dealing with revered past: Historical identity statements and strategic change in Japanese family firms

  • Journal article
  • Strategic Management Journal
  • Innan Sasaki,
  • Josip Kotlar,
  • Davide Ravasi,
  • Eero Vaara
Organisation Studies
Strategy
Innovation
See more publications

Engagement

Eero’s work is having a deep impact on organisations and society.

Eero has throughout his career actively collaborated with companies and other organisations in various roles. This has most often included collaborative research projects involving reciprocal learning, participation and consulting – especially in strategy work and mergers and acquisitions. He has combined this close collaboration with critical thinking and engagement with larger social and societal issues that matter. This is shown in the focus on issues such as participation in strategy-making, identity and legitimacy crises in organisational change, and corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

Teaching

Eero is the Academic Director of the DPhil in Management Programme and teaches on a number of postgraduate and executive programmes.

Eero’s teaching philosophy is based on constructionist learning, which means an emphasis placed on the student’s own experiences, dialogue in the classroom and critical thinking. This has become a cornerstone of his pedagogical thinking and in the development of courses and modules in our DPhil, MBA, Executive MBA, Diploma and other executive education programmes.

Current programmes include:

  • Executive MBA
  • DPhil in Management
  • MBA
  • Oxford Executive Leadership Programme
  • Oxford Executive Diploma in Organisational Leadership

Social Media

Get the latest news and updates from Eero on Twitter.

Oxford Answers

Thought-leadership and insights for business leaders written by our Faculty and Associate Fellows.
View articles by Eero.

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